It’s been six months since the inception of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network, and the decentralized currency’s infrastructure continues to grow. Over the past week, there’s been many new announcements surrounding the BCH chain and its ecosystem.

Six months have passed since the birth of the cryptocurrency bitcoin cash, and so far the protocol and economy continues to thrive despite the coin’s adversaries. Since the August 1st hard fork that produced the network, there’s been over 36,000 blocks mined, and the BCH chain is 8406 blocks ahead of the core chain. The Bitcoin Cash network recently had a successful hard fork which changed the protocol’s difficulty algorithm, and has kept mining profitability more consistent ever since the implementation. At 12.76 percent of the core chain’s difficulty, BCH is currently 5.6 percent more profitable to mine than BTC. Additionally this month BCH wallet providers and businesses implemented a new address format making it very difficult to send BCH to a BTC address.

Lots of infrastructure and support was added to the BCH ecosystem over the past seven days. This week the Bitcoin Unlimited development team released its Bitcoin Cash compatible client version 1.2.0.1. The release adds a few optimizations like a new and more performant logging system. In other news, the exchange Kucoin added BCH pairs section to its trading engine, bringing more liquidity to the BCH environment. The exchange details that the new BCH pairs section stemmed from lots of “community demand.”

The Village Catalog, an Online General Store, Focuses On Bitcoin Cash Acceptance; a New Woocommerce Plugin for BCH Released

Another addition to the BCH economy was the announcement from the Village Catalog an online general store that focuses on bitcoin cash acceptance. The Village Catalog sells a wide variety of healthy food products and cooking accessories for bitcoin cash.

“The Village Catalog is a place to find a quality product and have it shipped quickly and at a reasonable price — We use bitcoin cash because it’s peer-to-peer electronic cash in its original form: it is easy and cheap to transact with and secure to use,” explains the Village Catalog.

Another announcement that adds more bitcoin cash merchant adoption is the new Woocommerce plugin called ‘Cryptowoo’ that offers an API to take orders paid in BCH. Woocommerce version 1.2.1 allows any merchant using Word Press the ability to accept cryptocurrencies much like Bitpay and Paypal integrations. Additionally, if BCH supporters want to wait for Bitpay’s plugin the company announced its Woocommerce, WHMCS, and Prestashop implementations that will include bitcoin cash support.

Tokenstars Organization Plans On Switching to Bitcoin Cash

Following the merchant plugin release the charity organization Tokenstars has announced it is making the switch from BTC to BCH because bitcoin core fees are “too expensive.” Tokenstars hosts charity auctions tied to luminary autographs, celebrity products and even a chance to dine with well-known individuals. During the company’s ‘Crypto Xmas Charity Auction’ the team decided to accept bitcoin cash.

“The projects we launched in December, ‘Tokenstars’ Team’ token sale and Crypto Xmas Charity Auction, have shown that bitcoin is being used less for payments now — When compared to our ACE ICO from fall 2017, there is a sharp decline in bitcoin transactions — Bitcoin became too expensive for making regular payments and instead, bitcoin’s volatility and high commissions turned it into an investment tool,” Tokenstars CEO, Pavel Stukolov explains to news.Bitcoin.com.

In order to expand the number of Crypto Xmas Charity Auction participants, we now accept bets in bitcoin cash. We will also start accepting bitcoin cash as payment currency for Team tokens during TokenStars’ ICO.

Bitcoin Cash: What’s In Store for the Next Six Months?

Overall bitcoin cash had a decent few weeks minus the downwards market action that most cryptocurrencies experienced this January. Bitcoin cash has remained relatively stable compared to many digital assets in the space. And as we mentioned in our last Markets Update BCH markets have been strongly correlated with BTC’s market action. Bitcoin cash has remained consistently between 12-15 percent of BTC’s value. Usually, for every $1,000 BTC price drop, BCH dips about $100 and vice versa during more bullish market sentiment. BCH supporters believe the price will regain strength as proponents wait for more infrastructure support like Bitpay’s upcoming BCH invoice conversion. However, even though the two markets share a relationship right now the Civic CEO and entrepreneur, Vinny Lingham thinks bitcoin cash will someday outpace bitcoin core.

“Bitcoin and bitcoin cash are focusing on two totally different markets right now,” Lingham said in a recent Fast Money interview on January 25.

When I look at it from the product standpoint, I think the greater demand is for peer-to-peer cash than for digital gold.

In addition to the past couple of weeks, the six months of life the Bitcoin Cash network has experienced has been very fruitful. The pace of transactions continues to rise while fees remain cheap and confirmation times come quickly for users. Moreover, BCH developers have released their roadmap recently which discusses some of the proposals going forward for the next six months. Bitcoin cash could see another hard fork that increases the block size, and a variety of other features like colored coins. Not only is Bitcoin Unlimited donating its resources, but developers and representatives from several projects including Bitprim, Nchain, Bitcrust, ElectrumX, Parity, and Bitcoin XT are also all collaborating to bolster the BCH protocol’s growth.

What do you think about the growth of bitcoin cash and it’s latest infrastructure additions? Let us know in the comments below.